Midden Heap · Track 27 · middle

The Light-World's Han

The Mandaean tradition (1st–2nd c. – ongoing): the last living Gnostic religion, with John the Baptist as a central prophet. Down to 60,000–100,000 adherents after the Iraq war scattered the community and many priests died without training successors. The unbroken chain of a 2,000-year-old tradition fraying. Mechanism: genocide, displacement, the slow death by diaspora.

Lyrics

Your hand, in the current. Your breath, a white ghost in the air.
You are the last one on this bank of the Tigris who knows the old words.

Your son is a world away, an ocean away, in a city of steel.
He asks about the rituals on the phone.
You can hear the distance in his voice, the static of a new life.
You hold the Ginza Rabba, the great treasure, the ink a chain reaching back through two thousand years.
But the links grow thin.
The myrtle leaves you crush in your palm smell of memory, not of morning.

And this is the fraying of the light.
This is the unravelling of the long, unbroken line.
This is the water that is losing its name.
This is the deep, collective han of the scattered seed, the ache for a home that is only a river.

In 2003, the scattering began.
A wind that blew the people like dust across the continents.
Now a masbuta is a grainy video sent from Australia.
A prayer is a text message from Sweden.
You think of the other priests, the Ganzibra who died without ordaining a successor.
An unmarried man cannot make the water holy.
And there are no daughters here left to marry.
The law is the law, and the law is a closing door.

I wonder, did Yahya feel it then?
Standing in his own river, the Yardna.
A premonition of a line so long it was destined to thin, to evanesce?
You try to disremember the faces from the violence after the war, the names you buried.
But they rise from the current, thirsty.

I see you.
I sing the living water back to you.
This song is the river now.
I dip your name three times in the current of this verse.